Sardis Community Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility was given high marks in the category of long-term care. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with a grade of A+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.98995 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing score weighs a variety of subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared well in this subcategory. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a resident more frequently.

The last category we looked at was nursing, is this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. This was one of just a few dings of an otherwise strong report card. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most critical for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.